I am writing this a day late. I want to blame it on the weather. Well, that’s in part the case. The real reason is poor planning, and the realities of trying to do too many things. I had set aside two hours on Saturday evening and then I got to spend time with daughter Amy and granddaughter Zoe in their “new home”. Zoe had just finished her third church camp of the summer and was going though “post camp blues”. We had a great time listening to the two of them.
As we were preparing to leave, Zoe said “I hear rain on the sky lights”. And then it began. As I learned to say in Oklahoma, “This is a real Toad Choker.” I got soaked getting into the car. It was a much needed and cleansing rain. It got me to thinking about the gift of rain in my life. Today, the 21st of July is one of those milestone days that I will look back and say “I remember when”. So I will talk about “I remember when it rained”.
Colorado is not a place where it rains a lot. Rather, it is—Great Plains, High Desert, and a whole lot of Rocky Mountains. When I was five years old we had three days of continuous rain. It never stopped. I sat on the front porch and for what seemed forever, watched the rain continue. I could not even ride my bike.
In Colorado rain mostly comes on summer afternoons or evenings. The rhythmic dance that rain does goes like this. We begin with absolutely bright and welcoming mornings. Then usually around four pm the clouds gather and the possibilities of rain begins. Sometimes it rolls in with grand announcements of lightning and thunder. Other times, it teases us with sprinkles that do little more than mess up your windshield.
The next rain event that left an indelible memory was the flood of 1965. I was working at my dad’s business. To the north there were ominous dark clouds that completely engulfed Cheyenne Mountain and Pike’s Peak for hours. Then the news came— a flood was coming down the Fountain River. This river is a very short one. It begins in the mountains west of Colorado Springs, and ends at a confluence with the Arkansas River in Pueblo. Hundreds of people came up to the bluffs that overlook the Fountain to the West. It did not come as a wall but a surge. We watched a trickle become a twenty four foot wall of raging river. The most powerful image: an entire white house came bobbing down the torrent. It hit a bridge to my left and was pinned for maybe a minute. Then it disappeared, only to pop up on the other side. I spent the rest of the summer helping to clean rugs that were affected by the massive damage that water can cause.
I then moved to Oklahoma for college. Rain storms in that world are quite different. Let me in describe in just a few words—awesome, terrifying, inspiring, unpredictable, dangerous, and beautiful.
Here is one story— I was driving an ambulance. We received a call to go to a small town called Hunter, where a door had blown off a grain elevator and injured a worker. On the drive there in our Cadillac hearse converted to an ambulance, we ran into a ‘squall line’. We were in trouble. We had to stop the vehicle, and put it in park with our flashing lights going, on the highway. We put it in park and laid on the floor. Yes, it began to push us down the highway. After about two minutes we decided to press forward. We made it to the hurt man and got him to the hospital back in Enid. The drive back revealed trees and telephone poles snapped like pretzels—right where we had stopped.
Back to last night. The rain gave our neighborhood a well needed drink. The air this morning was clean and crisp. This quote of Jesus from Matthew 5:45, “God makes his sun rise on the evil and the good, and sends the rain on the just and the unjust”. On July 21st that seems very appropriate. (Do the math).
Onward and Upward,
Mark
Lyfting Me Up 